Stephanie Gutmann was once again inspired to write some long replies in the thread following Michael Totten's post about The Nut Job Media Circus that we agree are worth their own posting as a guest blog here, slightly edited to stand alone (previous: Stephanie Gutmann: Picture Posers). Gutmann:

A previous commenter said, "Think of how the history of the ME would be different if the media did not stage it for us." and it's absolutely true that it would have been...different.

I don't think the second intifada would have happened if Clinton hadn't already been in the neighborhood being tailed by the world's press contingent. He put Arafat under a media spotlight; Arafat couldn't deliver and was, for the first time in a long time, in the dog house as far as world opinion went, so, with the help of the press already in the area, he launched a media assisted war against Israel. He used the news coverage of the second intifada to fuel and accelerate the conflict. Think of the effect of Al-Dura, which might of course have been completely staged. Much of the "news" out of the territories is STIMULATED by the presence of cameras. There are now countless anecdotes of riots (like the one on September 30th, 2000, aka Al Dura day) that didn't start until the press was fully in place.

So why this collusion? Why aren't the press hoards in Kashmir or Chechnya or the Sudan? The worst most cynical part of this is that IT IS EASIEST to get the kind of sexy war story they want (an up/down, good/bad, weak/strong narrative and nice, eye-catching blood filled pix) while placing your people in Israel. The foreign press's bureaus are located on pleasant, tree-lined streets in the modern, progressive cities of Jerusalem or Tel-Aviv. And the Israeli government is there to assist the press: with briefings, regular daily email bulletins, translations, parties, seminars. They even intervene when reporter's equipment gets hung up in customs; they help to find apartments, nannies....They even (I do not lie) provide the foreign press with Christmas trees during the Christmas season...(I can supply the email from the government press office to prove this!)

Further, the craft of photography is tailor-made to be manipulated. Panning out would ruin so many news photos. As Michael J. Totten points out in the beginning of his post, the Rage Boy shot is taken as a close-up. That's because you can imbue any piddly-ass demonstration with great cosmic significance if you wade into the center of a knot of people and crouch down to make them appear larger. Suddenly you (the photographer) are in an epicenter of rage, while we, poor news consumers, are lost in the photo as well; we have no way of evaluating the breadth of the rage. Is it an important demonstration, the beginning of a world awakening, or a small bunch of exhibitionists such as one can find in any major city on virtually any day of the week?

This, the fudging of size, was the central distortion in the coverage of the so-called Jenin "massacre" in 2002 -- when the IDF moved into the Jenin refugee camp to battle the jihadists who had been using it as a base from which to stage a really terrible (a suicide bombing inside Israel nearly everyday in March 2002) campaign of terrorism.

All photos by the foreign press enclosed us in destruction -- rubble, collapsed buildings, twisted pipes, broken baby strollers. The accompanying copy told of a Jenin that had been "destroyed." The combination of copy and image suggested a scorched earth campaign by the Israeli military which naturally would have included the killing of any humans in the path of their tanks and armored Caterpillar tractors -- thus the use of the word "massacre" in press and human rights organization statements.

No one was able to cut through this noise to point out that the IDF assault had been on one small section of the city of Jenin -- the refugee camp. (Also that civilians had been given time to evacuate, that the insurgents left inside had been given much time to prepare for the IDF, that they had done so by mining and trip-bombing most of the camp area, and that much of the destruction was caused by Palestinian bombs.)

Much too late in the process (as was the history of the Israeli PR operation) Israel's government press office was able to get an aerial photo taken from a helicopter of the town of Jenin into circulation. It showed a town of Jenin lying below relatively untouched while a small portion, the refugee camp area, or about one fifth of the town, was indeed fairly pulverized.

If photographers really wanted to give us useful information about demonstrations they would go up on a rooftop, to a fourth story window, up a lamp post even, to show us the size of the crowd. But both photographer and writer have an interest in making whatever they've been sent to cover as important as possible. Freelance photographers live by selling dramatic shots; writers live by getting into print. Even staff writers on major newspapers must continually demonstrate their usefulness by "getting into the paper" as often as possible. Newspaper editors and publishers get committed to story lines ("to following a story") sometimes even before a story's begun, and those stories are thus committed to following a certain dramatic arc. A newspaper editor who has sent his reporter out on a story does not want to hear "not much happened today; I think this thing may be dying down" when she comes back.

As an editor I know once put it, "Why are we covering this then?" It was not a real question but more of a warning: On the order of, "We are covering it so you better find some news."